


maybe you'll take the long way home

by strikinglight



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Phichit likes driving and is an unironic but also unproblematic manic pixie dream boy, Pre-Series, That's it, he's also a carly rae jepsen stan, that's the summary, yuuri is doomed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 13:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8535484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: It’s been five years. He’s older now, and, if he’s really honest about it, no less afraid. But for half of that time he’s had this boy next to him—this strange, brave, happy boy from the same side of the world as him, who drives too fast and listens more to Carly Rae Jepsen than he does to their coach, but who always seems to know where he’s going even if Yuuri can’t tell the streets apart.
Or: five times Phichit takes Yuuri for a ride, and one time they stay in.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I've been in love with Phichit/Yuuri (phichuuri? phiyuuri? kindly enlighten me as to the ship name, internet) ever since that first video call. Purposefully vague about the timeframe because I wanted to keep this snapshotty but I believe with all my heart in their almost-canon pre-series whirlwind romance.
> 
> I also believe with all my heart in speed-demon Phichit who is also high priest of Carly Rae Jepsen, infallible goddess. Mostly because this fic is a long extrapolation of her song ["Let's Get Lost"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2BGjJ_4BTk), from which I've also lifted the title.
> 
> Liberties obviously taken with canon as far as Yuuri's claims of complete, total, absolute romantic inexperience are concerned, wink wink.

**i.**

“Do you want to go on an adventure?”

Studying for Accounting exams is always a little like drowning to Yuuri, down to the accompanying disorientation when he finally surfaces for air. He’s not entirely sure he’s heard his roommate right, so he looks up from his textbook to verify, squinting a little behind his glasses. “Sorry?”

“An adventure.” Phichit’s on his stomach in bed, loose-limbed after a full day of training, but his tone is firm, matter-of-fact. He could be reciting their address. “Do you want to?”

Yuuri frowns, going back and forth in his mind between the dull aches in his own limbs and the look of resolution on Phichit’s face. “It’s pretty late, though,” he tries first, cautiously. The clock on the side table says it’s nearly midnight, and they have an early day tomorrow. “I don’t think we should go out.”

Phichit considers this, one fingertip to his lips, eyebrows drawn together. He looks, for just a moment, sober. Reasonable.

“Not even for pizza?” That catches Yuuri off-guard—it’s not by any means what he was expecting—and Phichit jumps at the opportunity. “There’s a Shakey’s around the corner. We could take it out in ten, twenty minutes.” When he cocks his head to one side he looks closer to eight than eighteen. “It won’t be fun if I go alone. Please?”

It’s against his better judgment, but Yuuri chuckles. He closes the book. “Okay. Let’s try for fifteen minutes.”

Phichit’s eyes shine in the glow of Yuuri’s desk lamp, ink-dark as his hair, lively and sparkling. Yuuri’s already more charmed by those eyes than he knows. “You’re the best.” In two seconds he’s on his feet, holding out his hand. “Come on?”

Yuuri doesn’t know—not yet—what it is that makes him reach out and take that hand. He finds it smooth and strong, warm even without gloves. They’ve crept out of their room, down the hallway and into the elevator before he realizes he’s forgotten to let go.

  


* * *

  


**ii.**

Phichit gets his license over the summer and that soon means too many midnight joyrides in Celestino’s car—to this day Yuuri still has no idea if he steals the keys or if he’s telling the truth when he says, always with the cheeky grin and the twinkle in his eye Yuuri’s developed a healthy fear of, that it’s one of the perks of being the favorite child. Phichit drives like he skates, with precision and verve and a daring that’s set Yuuri’s teeth on edge more than once, made him pray to every god he knows that Phichit won’t get it into his head to try and make the car dance like they do on the ice every day.

“Relax,” he always says, rolling the windows down and popping in a CD. Even his music, Yuuri’s found, is the same way. All energy, all multicolored electric lights and sparkly synth, lyrics so barefacedly saccharine as to be almost corny, except they aren’t. _I really wanna stop, but I just got the taste for it. I feel like I could fly with the boy on the moon._ “I’ve been driving since I was a kid, remember?”

Yuuri knows this story—that his dad first put him behind the wheel at fifteen, that if you can handle a car in Bangkok without running over a tourist or five you can pretty much drive anywhere. He didn’t believe it at first, but put that together with everything else he’s learned about Phichit and it makes perfect sense. He’s been around a lot of risk-takers—it comes with the territory, after all—but no one he’s ever met has been quite like this. Phichit is cheerful, supportive, diligent—all of this swirls over an undercurrent of fearlessness, a spirit that burns brightest when he laughs. And he laughs loudly and often and when you least expect it.

Yuuri remembers him taking a particularly bad fall, turning his ankle wrong coming down from a jump, tumbling nearly head over heels. He’d been laughing then, on his back on the ice with his hands over his face. Only Yuuri would hear, later, as he walked Phichit back up to their room with one arm braced against his waist, how much it had hurt.

“I bet we could go all the way to Canada.” How very like Phichit to intrude into his recollection of these particularly ridiculous memories with an even more ridiculous suggestion. They’re following the river now, watching the city lights flicker out over the water. If they look far enough into the distance they can trace the length of Ambassador Bridge with their eyes. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“What could you possibly want to see in Canada?” What’s most ridiculous about it is it’s only half a joke. He’d do it, with enough encouragement. Yuuri turns his head away from the lights to smile at him and thinks that someone like Phichit would do anything, probably, just to see if he could.

Phichit shrugs. His fingers drum against the wheel in time to the music. _Late night, watching television. How’d we get in this position?_ “I don’t know. Bears. Waterfalls. Carly Rae Jepsen, maybe.”

_It’s way too soon, I know this isn’t love._

“You’re impossible.” Yuuri swipes at his head fondly, aims a punch at his shoulder instead when he ducks to one side. Being with Phichit like this is one of the few, rare things that makes him feel brave, because it’s not hard to believe he _can_ do anything. That’s his magic. Everything is easy for him; everything is easy with him, even when it’s not supposed to be.

  


* * *

  


**iii.**

They sneak out for coffee at 2 AM, two days before the season starts.

They park the car under a streetlamp to watch the moths circle, dancing and dipping in the pale yellow halo of light above their heads. Yuuri cradles his cup between his hands as Phichit tells him practice story after practice story, interpolating now and then to say his memory is incredible, how can he possibly remember all the funny things that have happened on the ice in the last year?

Remember when X elbowed Y in the face halfway through trying out a new lift? Remember when Z came to practice with his shirt inside out? Phichit’s whole face lights up when he tells stories. Brighter than the streetlamp. Brighter than a hundred streetlamps. Yuuri watches his lips move and his hands sketch out graceful spirals in the air and feels the flush spread from his ears all the way to the back of his neck. And Phichit doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t say a word about how intently Yuuri’s eyes are trained on him, how his coffee must already be going cold.

 _Remember when— Remember when— Remember when—_ And most of the time Yuuri finds that yes, he _does_ remember, even if he doesn’t notice half the things Phichit does, isn’t half so easily amused. But they’re both laughing now, leaning into each other, and suddenly Phichit’s hand is reaching up to curl around the hand that holds the cup, steadying it so nothing spills. His lips, Yuuri thinks, are about as soft as he imagined. Phichit draws back, too soon, and Yuuri blurts out as much.

It should be embarrassing, but all he does, of course, is laugh some more. Loud and exuberant and beautiful in the tiny little echo chamber of the car. “You imagined this!” And even if at this point he wants to die a little Yuuri finds he doesn’t need to admit that yes, yes he has. Maybe Phichit has too. That would be the funniest thing of all.

“You’re supposed to close your eyes, you know,” he says, and leans in and kisses him again as soon as Yuuri blinks.

  


* * *

  


**iv.**

Phichit goes straight back to practice after the season ends early for him. Yuuri meanwhile goes to his books, studying away his thoughts of dead dogs and abysmal competition scores and the bruising ache in the pit of his chest. He’s one set of final exams away from a hospitality management degree and whatever that might mean for a life after figure skating, even if it isn’t much more than going home and balancing the books at the inn. If his grades are anything to go by, he’d be good enough to be helpful, if not amazing. Better at any rate than...

Then, the sound of the door opening. Quiet footsteps in the entranceway to tell him Phichit’s home from the rink. He cracks open the door to their room and sticks his head in, and Yuuri sees he hasn’t taken off his coat.

“It’s nice outside. Want to take a walk?” His eyes go to the small mountain of textbooks on Yuuri’s desk, the yellow spot on one open page where his highlighter’s bleeding out, the cowlicks sticking up at the back of his head from too much frustrated rubbing. “Or do you have an exam?”

Which is to say he can say no. Yuuri thinks about it and realizes it’s always been a question with him, when it matters— _Do you want to?_ He’s always been free to say no. It’s not a terribly significant thing, but seen from a different angle the obvious care taken with something so small is precisely what makes it precious. Maybe that’s what makes him say yes, every time.

“You’d rather that than drive?” he asks, a little wry. It feels like the first time he’s smiled in months.

Phichit grins as he helps him shrug his coat on, says archly, “I like to take it slow sometimes too, you know.”

When he first came here, Yuuri remembers, he’d been so afraid of getting lost, too conscious all the time of his accent, his youth, his loneliness. Detroit had seemed a bigger city then, all the buildings the same, framed against the river. Even the water had scared him, so different from the sea that cradled Hasetsu—steel-blue or slate-grey depending on the weather, always somehow cold.

It’s been five years. He’s older now, and, if he’s really honest about it, no less afraid. But for half of that time he’s had this boy next to him—this strange, brave, happy boy from the same side of the world as him, who drives too fast and listens more to Carly Rae Jepsen than he does to their coach, who always seems to know where he’s going even if Yuuri can’t tell the streets apart.

He’s been thinking more about home lately, more about Phichit in terms of the miles home would put between them. They’ve never talked about the future before. Sometimes he wonders if Phichit would take the choice to leave—or is it to return?—against him. Would he think himself not worth staying for? But Phichit’s not like that.

“Hey.” There’s a guest card for his graduation ceremony that he’s been carrying around in his pocket for almost a week. It feels flimsy when he stops Phichit at a crossing with a hand on his arm, almost cheap when he fishes it out and offers it, but it’s all he has. “This was for my mom, but things are busy at home right now and she won’t be able to fly out. I was wondering if you’d like to...?”

“Whoa, Yuuri! You really think I’m as important as your _mom?”_ He’s delighted, of course, eyes shining like Yuuri’s just offered him a ring. It’s the most Phichit-like of reactions, for sure, but it still comes as a surprise. Yuuri doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it, how easy it is to make him happy. “Of course I’ll go.”

The bigger surprise is when Phichit takes not the card but Yuuri’s hand, sliding both card and hand into his own pocket. He grins again at Yuuri’s wide eyes and flushed cheeks as the light in front of them turns green, but his steps are steady and his grip secure.

“I’ll livetweet it,” he says.

Helplessly, “Please don’t.”

They cross to the other side arm in arm, laughing, heads leaning together against the wind.

  


* * *

  


**v.**

Yuuri wakes one morning with the acute realization of two things—that Phichit’s hands are on his face, and they’re _freezing._

“Stop.” It’s half a whisper and half a groan as he turns on his side, half-sinking into the gap between their two beds pushed together. Cold must mean the radiator’s on the fritz again, but somehow that’s less wrong than the fact that it’s crept into Phichit’s skin. Phichit’s always warm, a little fire burning at the center of him, sun-bright. “I’m sleeping.”

The truth is, of course, that he _doesn’t_ want him to stop—and Phichit knows it, so it doesn’t stop him. All of these things, now, go without saying.

“You’re not. You’re talking to me.” The hands slide down from his face to his neck, from his neck to his shoulders, gently pushing him back against the mattress. Yuuri’s shivering through his shirt, under those hands. “And if you stay there you’re going to fall.”

 _Too late,_ he almost says. He’s not sure if that, too, goes without saying.

“Yuuri.” His name on Phichit’s lips sounds like dawn, rosy, gold-touched, suffused with more warmth than he ever thought was possible to find between two bodies and a tangle of blankets. And soon it’s those lips he feels too, ghosting over his skin, lingering on his forehead and the bridge of his nose and the soft spot under his jaw where his pulse beats. “Yuuri _jǎa_ , come on.”

He already knows what he’ll see when he cracks an eye open—Phichit propped up on his elbows, bending down toward him with a smile, close enough for Yuuri to trace the way his hair slants as it feathers down over his forehead, count his eyelashes. Behind his head, tangling him up in its rays, the sun is shining.

The light loves him. That much, Yuuri’s always known.

The clock on the side table says it’s 6:30 AM. There’s a plane ticket tucked between the pages of his planner and a sheaf of papers on his desk that still need his signature, but this is the wrong mood for thinking about such things. Instead he reaches upwards for the light and pulls it in toward himself, and tells himself it’s okay to forget.

  


* * *

**  
**

**vi.**  


It’s Phichit he finds in the garage the morning he’s supposed to fly home, leaning against the wall, twirling the keys around one finger like he’s been waiting. Out of habit Yuuri opens his mouth to scold—he really is impossible, did he steal the keys again—but already Phichit’s straightened up and reached for his suitcase.

“He asked me to,” he says, bending a little to open the trunk. “He’s bad at saying goodbye, you know.”

Yuuri circles around and slides into the passenger seat, another habit he knows he’ll soon need to outgrow. He knows he couldn’t have handled a long farewell either, though he wonders if he has any right to say so, when he’s the one that’s leaving everything behind, when choosing to walk away had been as easy as signing his name.

He doesn’t realize he’s been staring into space until Phichit reaches over to buckle him in.

“Seatbelt,” he says, leaning forward into Yuuri’s field of view with a grin, and Yuuri never asked to remember the lights in his hair out by the river, or the bridge to Canada they joked about crossing together, so many times, but he is. Then all too soon they’re pulling out of the apartment building he no longer lives in, driving fast with the river on their right side, and Phichit’s turning the volume up on that one Carly Rae album they both know back to front by now.

Phichit’s smiling but he’s quiet. Not singing along, not tapping out the beat with his fingertips. Just cruising with his eyes forward. They’ve already pulled out of town when Yuuri notices.

“Can I hold your hand?” he says. It feels precious just to ask, but for Phichit it’s nothing, it’s as easy as it’s always been. His face brightens. His hand lifts unhesitating from the wheel and opens toward Yuuri and Yuuri takes it like a blessing, threading their fingers together, holding loosely. “Sorry,” he adds, under his breath, because he’s not sure he deserves this when he never learned to drive. When he never stopped being scared of getting lost, even with Phichit behind the wheel.

But what if, at least in this particular time and place, none of that matters? There are so many things Yuuri doesn’t know, but it’s possible he’s starting to get better at holding to things that are certain—recognizing generosity when he sees it, and faith and kindness, all these things in the gentle pressure of Phichit’s fingers and the way his face softens when he says, “It’s okay. Don’t worry; it’s okay.”

It always sounds like he means it; it sounds like it’s not just for now. And maybe it’s enough that the ride is precious for itself, that Yuuri can lean back into that trust and daydream as they watch the clouds breaking overhead—the two of them hand in hand like a pair of dumb kids in a stolen car, talking, occasionally smiling at each other, speeding down a highway so long there seems to be no end.

**Author's Note:**

> A last note: the Thai word จ๋า / _jǎa_ is a particle that's generally used to express intimacy/affection. You could think of it as roughly corresponding to something like "dear" in English, though the word itself has no specific meaning. (peace sign emoji)


End file.
